On Monday night, Mindy Meyer, the 22-year-old New York state senate candidate with a very pink…
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The takeaway from this is not that her loss was a predictable landslide, but that somehow a young, profoundly clueless woman miraculously received 2,553 votes in Brooklyn. Subtract the 25 family and friends who showed up to her October gala and this means about 2,525 grown, non-blood-related people voted for Mindy Meyer. This, after she skipped her own debate. This, after she used a fire-sale political fundraiser as an excuse to be on someone else's catering reality show. This, after not being able to identify Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. Mindy Meyer got more votes than socialist Presidential candidate Peta Lindsay received (2,103) in the whole state.

Who are these 2,500-plus voters? We know you're out there. Can we offer you something? Some soup? Better glasses? Free tutoring?

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Meyer's acknowledged inspiration was Legally Blonde's Elle Woods. The problem with her choice—and I'm being generous here—isn't that Reese Witherspoon's preposterous character is a silly fictional archetype: you can certainly be dopey in dialogue and still connect with the populace, see Sarah Palin. But Mindy wasn't only a clumsy communicator, she was uninformed and defiantly unapologetic about it. When reporters would question her about on-record ignorance, she responded with palpable annoyance. Like, Why are you bothering me?

By the time her Inwood "fundraiser" rolled around last month, Meyer's interest in this whole fun political thing had visibly waned. You wanted her to redeem herself (okay, I did), but instead it was like she'd volunteered for high-school student government, disappeared after three meetings, and now showed up again six months later to curtsy for a special guest, who in this instance, happened to be a BRAVO film crew. Oh yeah, and could the reporters we invited please get out of the shot?